Android Increases Share Of U.S. Smartphone Market, More Playing Games On Phones

A new report on the U.S. mobile phone market finds Google's Android OS being used on an increasing plurality of all smartphones, as more mobile phone users overall report playing games on their handsets. ComScore's September MobiLens survey of over 30,000 mobile phone users found that Android was being used on close to 45 percent of the 87.4 million smartphones in the United States, up from 40.2 percent in June. The gains came at the expense of RIM's Blackberry OS, which fell from 23.5 percent to 18.9 percent of the smartphone market in the period. Apple's iOS creeped up from 26.6 percent of the market to 27.4 percent, while Microsoft's Windows Phone stayed relatively flat at 5.6 percent. While Android dominates the smartphone category, the entire smartphone market still only makes up 37 percent of the 234 million mobile phones in use in the U.S., according to the report. ComScore's survey also found 28.8 percent of all U.S. mobile phone users played mobile games in September, up slightly from 26.9 percent reported in June and 28.5 percent reported in August. That ratio is comparable to the number of U.S. mobile phone users that accessed social networks on their phones, but well below the 71.1 percent that use phones for text messaging.